Evolution Doesn't Explain Life

Quick thought I had. People seem to talk as if evolution explains life, and especially to argue pro/con (mostly con) as if it did so. I wonder if [fundamentalist] religious folks would be more comfortable with evolution if someone were to stop and explain that Darwin meant his title quite literally, that "The Origin of Species" isn't about the origins of life, but, particularly, how speciation occurs once life is active. Maybe not, since religions with creation myths don't generally start with, "In the beginning, there was a stochastic biochemical process....", but one never knows. :-)

Feasting

So I read today (as part of an article on a vaguely related subject) that 30% of USian women are obese. If the salad-eating sex is that overweight, one can only imagine what the current status for men is, but it probably isn't pretty. As someone who's been fighting with his weight for a year or so, I've been paying a lot of attention to this subject for awhile (especially during the Holidays), and we did a lot of eating this December. I remind myself often of the Arab saying "a man who eats when full digs a grave with his teeth", and it came into my head when the article I was reading mentioned that the Japanese say one should eat until about 80% full. Given that it seems every culture has a "leave a little on your plate" saying, I'm thinking that maybe what we need to help with our eating is to bring back the verb-form of "feast". Perhaps we should call feasting "eating until full or stuffed", as opposed to just normal eating, and use that as a self-calibration measure. Especially since "eating until full" leaves an error range from "less than full" to "more than full", and whenever we eat to "more than full", our stomachs attempt to expand to accommodate -- this could be a slippery slope. Regular, "normal" eating, would then be eating such that one's error range doesn't exceed full.

Not terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but I rather like memes and I'm still overweight, so there ya go....